Martin Stig Andersen is a human being who breathes air, eats food and drinks water, just like the rest of us--but unlike you and I, he was responsible for the audio of LIMBO.

Martin was in tow at this year's Game Developer's Conference to give an advance look at some of the sound design and systems behind Playdead's upcoming title, INSIDE, as well as spend some time at the Audiokinetic booth on the show floor showing off all the knobs and wires.

And look, I don't want to oversell his talents too much, because there's a nonzero chance that he'll read this at some point and it could be really weird when I run into him down the line. It already is, to an extent. For a lot of people. After a few years of realizing that everyone behind your favorite game experiences are just people, you cool it with the crazy sycophantic fandom stuff. Mostly. But Martin's got a really, really sharp mind for sound design and interactive audio, and I wouldn't be the first person to tell him so.

I kinda feel bad for him, actually; there was, even in the rushed fifteen-minutes-on-a-Friday time I hung around the booth, this revolving Who's Who cast of sound designers that'd never hire me, asking questions and pointing at the screen and talking coolly to Martin about their thoughts. Satisfied, they would end this exchange in this self-aware explosion of hurried fandom on how incredible his work is and how important LIMBO was to them and gosh, I dunno, you're just a genius, and thank you so much for doing everything you do, Martin, before shaking his hand and dashing off.

Maybe there's another article in me sometime about how damn weird it must be to be on that other side, or on the etiquette of admitting prior knowledge of a person and how much you love them when you're finally face to face on the conference floor. I do think about it a bunch, and usually just tell people to chill.

For now I should get to brass tacks on what Martin and Playdead are up to and how you might learn from it.

A Brief History

First off, get familiar: if you haven't played LIMBO, what the fuck are you doing here?

You can either play it now, or after this article makes it realize you should, but it'd probably inform the read a little bit.

Martin's work on LIMBO set a lot of firsts for game audio, or at least, went public with them in a way that let their influence really start to bear on this generation of sound designers. On the design front, LIMBO's soundscape is a perfect match for the stark, blurred-out out monochrome of the game's visuals. Sounds move from muffled, wire recorder-processed bits of texture to full-frequency moments of danger that leap to the fore. The similarly blurred line between what's sound / what's music is tread almost invisibly through the game thanks to Martin's nearly Musique Concrete approach of tuning everything to fit together. There's a talk on this from GDC 2011--watch it.

Beyond its aesthetic accomplishments, LIMBO was the poster child of How You Should Do Things In Wwise for many years. The game released in 2009; the program Martin used to stitch all this logic together, I bet most of us would barely recognize. But he sure as heck accomplished. Credit where it's due, Playdead seems to have given him a really wonderful suite of debug tools with which to draw bounds and place events for determining mix states throughout the game's stages. This mix what glues it all together is consistently auto-attenuating, resetting, evolving as the player adventures onwards. Watch the talks I link at the bottom. These were shown in Martin's 2012 lecture on implementation--again, watch the talks.

So yeah man, this game was a big deal.

Shortly after completing LIMBO, Playdead scooped up audio programmer Jakob Schmid in a really smart first-round draft. Playdead's lead gameplay designer, Jeppe Carlsen, set off to explore the Unity game engine and try his hand at a different sort of platformer, bringing along Schmid, as well as motion graphics designers Niels Fyrst Lausdahl and Andreas Arnild Peitersen. They'd create what eventually became 140, a visually mesmerizing platformer in which each level's elements (blocks, elevators, etc.) were choreographed by the game's soundtrack, knitting it all together in a really cohesive and trippy package. See for yourself!

Years later, with these audio engine-directed learnings in place, INSIDE's in full production, and we get to where we are now. Headline! Inside INSIDE: Playdead Comes Alive.

The Talk

Get It Right The Second Time

Nothing's ever perfect in the mind of its creator. Martin revealed that one of his biggest regrets with LIMBO was the way the death / respawn interrupted the flow of the game's soundscape. If you weren't particularly bothered by this, it's probably because this is the way we expect games to work. When we fade to black, things go quiet; when we fade up, all is new again. Games flush cache and reload variables across moments like this, and lots about what the audio engine knows or is doing goes along for the ride. It's bog standard.

Thing is, in LIMBO, you die a lot. And Martin had very specific goals for its sound experience--an ever-evolving, blend of literal and acousmatic sound effects, textures and pads--that clash with the way the audio engine's impersistence. Imagine the Boy's deaths and the player's experience of the world as one, unbroken timeline, and you can start to see Martin's perspective: you intend for some sound design, or a particular mix state to play just at the player's first encounter with an area, and these serve as passage into some new part of the overall composition. You'd rather not back out of it until the player's advanced, and every death before the next checkpoint is part of that same section of the piece. Retriggering these cues "because Memory Management" goes against artistic intent and makes things feel much more "game"y than they need to.

This time around, they set the sound engine to start at the beginning of the game, and never, ever unload until the game has finished. Everything the audio engine knows, and everything the game knows about that rolls all the way through, untouched until the game is shut off. This means voices don't need to cut off, playback position can be remembered, mix states and other game object-specific variables can be adjusted with the long view in mind.

We do something similar at PopCap with our music system, firing off one event at sound engine initialization and letting it roll until the session's done or interrupted. The game's music evolves through State changes over time. Mostly, we do this because guaranteeing the music's on lets us steer it mid-flight with Events we've created ourselves, instead of relying on developers to trigger those cues. Also, cycling things in and out of memory costs CPU, which is itself a precious commodity on mobile.

So this idea of keeping the audio engine alive forever is not new--nor are a lot of the bullet points that make up the technical considerations of INSIDE.

Yet, there's something magical in the way they're all brought together.

How This Sounded

To illustrate the shortcomings he saw in LIMBO, Martin presented a couple of gameplay clips of the boy dying and respawning with their original audio in place--and then a few clips of the same sequence with their audio replaced to allow the music to play through.

The Befores and Afters here are subtle. Music cues which fired off just as a player first encountered a challenge (hopping across the electrified HOTEL sign) happened just once, the first time, and the rest of the piece continued through every fade to black as the boy died a handful of times in trying to cross this section. It lent a really nice continuity to the segment that wasn't there when everything had to restart on each reload.

A practical example of this on INSIDE takes place in one of the game's many puzzles. Martin demonstrated a section in which the Boy's got to flip a breaker switch that turns out a few dangerous, rotating sentry lights that will kill him if crossed, but whose light he nonetheless needs to proceed.

Those lights sounded dangerous as all get-out; really great, full-spectrum stuff. Activating them drives a railroad spike through what's been a cautiously filtered mix up until this point. They seize and hold your attention, and they are meant to: Don't fuck with these lights.

[pullquote align="left"]Martin quipped that these were "such small changes that the player [was] unlikely to notice them," but that's a very knowing statement.[/pullquote]

But the focus shifts thereafter to the Boy and how you'll help him through this. So, in a persistent mix decision that leverages this always-on audio engine, the game begins to attenuate those lights on subsequent deaths and reloads. Even though the game objects associated with those sounds are trashed in the interim, those variables are kept alive in the sound engine, to which the game looks for its cues.

We saw this same phenomenon in LIMBO, with an incredibly layered attenuation system that slowly swung the volume of the boy's footsteps up and down within a 15dB window, irrespective of camera distance and entirely for this effect.

What happened there, and what'll happen with INSIDE, is that all of these subtle changes sum up to larger changes you feel, even if you can't quite put your finger on them. This is the mix as conversation with the player than some unweighted diegetic reality, broadcast out.

Again, there's no one showstopper here, it's the concert of everything working together. You start to see what five years' tuning will get you.

Listening to What?

That sounds all well and good, but the name of the talk--what exactly is the game listening to?

INSIDE's been structured so that many of its events and logic are fired and evaluated totally within the context of the audio engine, which has some really rad creative consequences I'll think out loud about in a bit. For starters, this top-down audio-driven vision required that "game time"--which is usually measured in frames, and can swing variably up and down depending on system performance--has instead been locked to Wwise's metronome.

None of this is gonna bob to the rhythm. No, you'll have to listen. [Credit: http://www.stealthybox.com/playdead-comes-inside-next-game/]

The BPM of INSIDE's soundtrack (and I use the term loosely, as none of it seems so obviously musical) is the actual beating heart of the game. You can easily envision how this would work in something like Rock Band, or 140, but INSIDE is very different from those games. It's bleak, desaturated and looks very much like it rose from the bones of LIMBO. That's another way of saying, it's not flashing note charts and neon elevators in your face--but the all-powerful thrum of its soundscape in just as much in control.

Robot Rock

Here's an example.

In one scene, the Boy is in a factory, sneaking between the rank and file of a bunch of deactivated automata. There's a conspicuous space between two of them, and as you step into it, a track-mounted security drone snaps to life from just above, latching you with a spotlight. The steady pulse of the factory swells into a rhythm; the line of machines begins to march. It's The Sorcerer's Apprentice meets Pink Floyd's "The Wall," and the player's got to keep lockstep with the beat to avoid being snicked by the drone.

[pullquote align="right"]There are no scrolling meters or anything to let you know that this is how this section needs to be played--by now, the game has taught you to listen.[/pullquote]

Four bars of a march, four bars of silence. The drones stop, you stop. The drones move, you move. Just like that.

There are no scrolling meters or anything to let you know that this is how this section needs to be played--by now, the game has taught you to listen.

(Actually, I'm wondering how the hearing-impaired are ever supposed to play this game. Or even those without some extended low-end going on in their living room, because GODDAMN this game is about the well-crafted sub.)

Here, as everywhere, the soundscape rolls straight through your horrifying understated death. If you were to start tapping your foot to the march of this level, you could keep it up until you finished. Probably beyond, actually. I think Martin mentioned that they wanted music to transition between areas as well. (Of course...)

"But, it takes a few seconds to pull the curtains back up and drop you into that robot conga line for another try. What if I respawn right in the middle of a marching part?"

Glad you asked, simulated reader!

At the point when you die, the game engine's checking the playback head over the march's Music Playlist container to evaluate how much time will have passed by the time the player's back in control after being revived.

That looked a lot cooler when it existed only in my brain. Basically though, if the game's going to respawn you during a march, it instead segues into a two bar transition of more Don't Move soundscape that buys you some time to react. Bear in mind again that the game can know these timings intimately, because game logic time has been slaved to music time; no matter how crummy your system, the game and Wwise are in constant deterministic communication. "Hey, garbage collection's done--ready to reload. Where are we?"

The Shockwave

Here's another cool one.

There's a part of the game in which a distant wave cannon is firing into the foreground, directly towards the screen. Like the way you'd throw guys in Turtles in Time.

As each pulse lands, things splinter and smash, sheet metal flies away, the screen shakes. You've got to run the Boy left to right, up and down, from cover to cover within the merciful intervals in which this weapon reloads.

No one called this thing a "wave cannon," but in starting to write this, it occurred to me that I don't know what sort of blast this thing's actually firing. And that's because there's no visual cue that shows you each of these pulses coming in, only the aftermath their impacts leave on the environment.

Here again, you're forced to listen to survive. All of the logic surrounding whether the Boy lives or dies is slaved to the metronome of the level.

The metronome, in this case, is quite literally the entire envelope of this terrifying weapon sound, whose variations are implemented as a Playlist within the Interactive Music Hierarchy.

Just like with the march, the playlist container of the wave cannon envelope's dotted with annotations that send information out to the engine: trigger blast effects, shake the screen, check to see if the Boy's behind cover or not. The last one's key, because the game is actually checking to see if you're behind cover or not at the peak of the sound but before all the visuals of the sound rippling through the foreground fire off.

I think this delay was baked in to allow a little grace window for the player to scramble, but it means that you could be behind cover at the moment of this check, duck out into the open right afterwards and be found safe, even as you stand amidst all the flying wreckage.

Disconnect // Net Effect

In a lot of games, that scenario'd seem like a bug. But, I find this moment of potential disconnect between sound and visuals super interesting, because it actually serves to strengthen the connection between sound and survival.

Surviving despite the visuals telling you you shouldn't have lets the player know: It's not the impact what kills you. It's the sound.

The sentry doesn't kill you--the march does.

I haven't played a minute of INSIDE, and I've only seen what Martin's been willing to show, but I would bet you that the game's full of tiny little asynchronicities that cement this relationship over the course of the game. Moments that cut out the middleman and teach the player that sound is the gentle jury and dispassionate executioner.

Sound doesn't point to the reward, the feeling that you're safe--it quite literally means those things.

A positive music transition didn't happen because you passed a checkpoint, it IS the checkpoint.

Maybe? Could be that I'm giving the guy too much credit, but I kinda stand with @mattesque:

The Expo Floor

The shepherds and their flock.

On the last day of GDC, I finally made time for the Expo Floor, and just enough to get to the Audiokinetic booth. It happened to be during one of Martin's demo slots. It was, as the rhapsodic quality of this article has likely made clear, one of the highlights of my conference--not because of what it contained, but because of how it made me feel about myself afterwards.

I don't have a great extended metaphor to wrap around what it's like to check out a new Wwise project from the creator of LIMBO; suffice to say, a cloned copy of LIMBO's Wwise project, dirty production laundry and hacks and all, is a checkbox you can elect to grab when you're installing a new build of Wwise. Like, the way you'd download a Hendrix guitar simulator or how you page through Richard Devine presets in every fucking sound design tool you use, that's where Martin is with Wwise. It takes a certain mind.

Anyways, I expected to see some super next-level shit and come away feeling like I needed to get a thankless job aboard some Alaskan fishing boat, so destroyed was my confidence.

But actually? I kinda understood everything that was going on. I think you will, too.

I don't even see the code.

Even having seen the wiring in the walls, the thing that struck me about INSIDE's implementation wasn't its complexity--it was its elegance.

You know when you build a standalone Wwise demo for a reel, and because you don't have all the live inputs a game would actually have, you have to rig up all sorts of little tricks to simulate the Soundcaster session feeling like the real thing might? (Shameless plug.) Well, the INSIDE Wwise project felt kinda like Martin did that, and then everyone else just made the game work around it.

Or like a track layout after you've gone in and pruned out all those garbage layers that weren't helping anything. Clean, purposeful, only what needed to be there.

Some cool stuff that's going on:

Physics Is It: Animations are not tagged. Besides footsteps, anyways. Player limb physics velocities and angles are measured and sent in as RTPCs, which flip switches on constantly-running events that trigger bits of movement coming through when thresholds are crossed. Bet you this matrixes with the material system in place to make sure the right sound plays every time. Several games are doing this and have done it already! Just a reminder that if you can, you should, too. Where is the line between "footsteps" and "foot-based physics system impacts" drawn, anyways?

Beat Your Feet: Player breath events are fired according to the player's run speed: the game measures the frequency of the Boy's footfalls and generates a rough BPM out of that, firing breath requests off at the intervals that naturally emerge. This keeps the breaths consistently in sync with the player's movement, as well as lets things settle into the same rhythm we do when we're running and breathing out in the wild.

It's the Little Things: Running consistently puts the player into various states of exhaustion, which switch breath audio into more exasperated-sounding sample sets, as well as probably adjust the trigger rate to some degree. There's a cooldown period thereafter as the player recovers. (It wouldn't shock me if they're driving the Boy's exhausted animations from these RTPCs, rather than the other way around. But I didn't ask.)

What They're Meant For: Blend Containers everywhere. I'll be honest, I haven't used one of these things for more than "play a bunch of stuff at once" holders for a long time, now, but it doesn't shock me that they're aplenty in place in INSIDE, and used exactly to effect. Take water movement: Martin had the Boy leap onto a rope above a pool of water, shimmying down it until he could swing back and forth across the water's surface. A bunch of light, lapping swishes play as you skim the shallows. Descend further, and those movements blend into a sample set of deeper water movements without skipping a beat.

Little Things, Vol. 2: The Boy's wetness is tracked after he leaves the water, contributing to a sweetener layer on footsteps and movements (material-specific, of course) until, after enough movement, that's gone down to zero. I bet you there are even blend containers there for various states of wet-dry balance.

One More Thing

If someone asks you about the audio of INSIDE and you wanna get 'em excited about it really quick, drop this bomb:

"[Its] sound design's in the Interactive Music Hierarchy, and its music lives in the Actor-Mixer Hierarchy."

Okay, not all of it is. Like basically all the movement sounds I just listed up there are probably not.

But as the natural counterpart to that wave cannon's spot in a Music Playlist, much of the game's ambient music is fired off within the Actor-Mixer Hierarchy. Annotatations on the looping playlists of the game's 'music' (read: its sounds) are sent out to the engine and back in as Play Events that trip random containers full of variably trigger-rated pads and bits of texture. INSIDE's music, basically, is set up like you and I would set up unseen ambience emitters. Neat trick!

Q&A

I had a few questions for Martin that I wasn't able to ask during the talk, because there were lots of others who went before me. So, I had an extra day or two to work them over in my head before I got the chance to pose them. By Friday, I felt pretty confident about what his answers would be, especially so after having toured the Wwise project--which was laid out so sensibly, refined down to such a point that all the cool things it was doing felt pretty self-evident.

Just the same, I had to know a couple of things:

Q: What do you with five years' worth of time on a game? What takes the longest--the asset creation, establishment of the style, systems and implementation?

A: "Yes, [the implementation]."

This squares with my experience as well. Yes, sound design and palette establishment can take a while, ditto the core engine setup, but I've worked on a couple of Wwise projects, and you don't go straight from concept to getting them looking like that. Everything was so spartan and deliberate; you could tell that this was a project where they got to go back after all the messy experimentation and do exactly what they needed to from ground up.

It creates the appearance of unbroken genius from start to finish, but the only thing unbroken about it's the intent, really.

We may never have the time to fully refactor all of our experiments into project-wide elegance, but it's a reminder to upkeep as you go. As projects stretch onwards, hacks bite back.

And the big one.

Q: In a game where everything's looking to the audio to make its judgment calls, the sound designer wields a tremendous amount of power: you shorten one of those wave cannon loops or move an annotation, and suddenly, the level becomes impossible to pass.

This top-down causality makes you kind of a Game Designer on INSIDE.

How was that balancing act with the rest of the team? Were there a lot of interdisciplinary power struggles and overstepped boundaries? Or did you all just kind of work it out amicably for the sake of the game?

A: "Yes, [we just worked it out]."

I mean, there you have it.

It strikes me that on larger team or in more egoistic environments, this kind of thing wouldn't fly. People can get precious about their work, and this subversion of the trickle-down flow where audio's usually the last to know and the most affected--well, it'd take a certain somebody to ease that paradigm shift through. Martin strikes me as that kind of guy. If you've listened in to any of this year's Sightglass discussions, the hearsay on how audio managed to work out such a sweet deal on this game came down to a

"If Martin wants it, Martin gets it"

... sort of vibe within the team.

But, I don't think it needs to be that way.

Take this, from this year's talk on the Music and Sound Design of Ori and the Blind Forest--

I think the greatest clue to Ori’s artistry is buried in this excerpt: “The motivator [was] the game’s success—nothing else.” #GameAudioGDC

That's to say, if you've got a team that's willing to have the hard discussions, battle it out, put the game before all else--all of these little struggles eventually become scraps of forgotten noise.

I don't doubt that Playdead works much like this. But who can say!

The Takeaways

I'm still not sure of what to say here. There's no one big secret weapon trick I've walked away from my time with INSIDE. If I had to stretch for some global ones:

If you weren't convinced that Proactive Audio were gonna be a thing yet, well. Even Playdead's doing it!

Animation tagging stuff sucks, it'd slipped my mind for a while that physics-based movement is a much better way to go

Thriiiiilling!

As a personal takeaway, though?

The entire experience of this talk, where Martin laid out the showstopper points of what he's doing--and the Wwise project, where you got to see all the less glamorous finishing touches that nonetheless adorn the game--left me feeling, well, strangely empowered. It's been five years since I last saw Martin speak, and I left that talk with my head in a million pieces. Maybe I've learned a few things since then, because I was able to keep it well together this time around. It's a credit to the way he thinks about sound, and to the accessible degree everything's been refined, that I listened to and looked at all this stuff and just felt like, "I get it."

Made me feel like maybe I could do something down the line that'd make someone else feel the same way.

As a parting shot, then, maybe this is a reminder to acknowledge the way you'll walk away from this article having understood a few things--and to give yourself credit for that.

None of us is Martin, but even Martin's got to brush his teeth in the morning.

We'll all make a thing like this someday if we just stick with it.

Get Yer Stig On

As a coda to all this, here's a solid collection of Stig-related resources for you to geek over.

If you count on this site for nothing else, it should be for starry-eyed reflection on whatever year's Game Developer's Conference. So, here we are again.

Most of what can be said about #GameAudioGDC 2016's beensaid already, and I'll leave the rest of it to voices more capable, or rarely heard. But I was there, again. Through the coffee--the too damned early coffee--through the the exhaustion; I showed up as often as I could. Through the talks, hallways, through the barely-controlled screaming that passes for conversational volume at the Death Star, I spoke and listened. I drank. I slept, barely. I went to Denny's.

It's an unceasing read / write cycle on your soft tissue flash memory, and you end the week completely full up on ideas you fear you're about to lose.

As a completely selfish mnemonic act, here's what I thought and felt coming out of this year's GDC.

Observations on Year Five

The least packed of days.

*Six, technically, but five since I really started this sound thing.

Skip the talks. Skip the pass, even. My first piece of advice to game audio hopefuls and veterans alike has ever been "follow @lostlab," and this year, he did an interesting thing: he didn't attend a single talk. I mean, besides the ones he paneled on. No, this year, he went Full Sightglass, passing on most of the conference proper for meetings, time on the Expo floor and the morning conversations around the coffee table. Which, incidentally, was packed as fuck. Someday soon, we're gonna need a bigger boat, but that upstairs ain't taking on water just yet.

It's a strategy. The deeper you get into game audio, the more you've seen and done, the lesser the odds of That One Talk (or Any Talk) that's gonna crack your brain open. No one I'd talked to knew what they were planning on attending before the conference which, I think, speaks to the way your priorities shift as time goes on. The greatest experiences of GDC happen outside Moscone, and the really good ones that don't? Well, they tend to wind their way back to Sightglass each morning. Smart play, Damian.

tl;dr

If you're new to the show, or to the field, I can still totally recommend the Audio Pass. But the next time you're back, or the time after, you'll find it makes sense to shift tracks:

If you can speak (and you can!); if you've got a company that'll buy you a pass (you probably don't), you can go All Access. Extra-disciplinary talks are the best, 'cause you have to fight to make them relevant, extrapolate some meaning out of them that you can bring back to audio. Every year, all of my best ideas are borne out of that mental reframing that comes in the middle of a talk on AI or Art or Monetization and ask, "Why the heck am I here? What can I learn from this?" Try it. You'll be surprised!

If neither of the above apply, or you're burnt? Just go Expo Pass. Or nothing. Take the Damian approach, and reap 99% of the good stuff you'd get out of attending.

We Are Legion

The VGM Mixer at Terroir. So this x3 was roughly Brewcade.

As @mattesque put it on this week's Bleeps and Bloops, "at some point game audio got to the point where people felt like they could win without other people losing."

My Gosh, but there are a lot of game audio professionals out there. Day Zero's Designing Sound Brewcade meetup had something like 260 RSVPs. 260!

The above quote is lifted from last year's recap, and it still rings. Because while we've got a fuckton of work to do, I think the game audio community's the best it's ever been. We've got the Slack, we've got Twitter, we've got a million and one write-ups exactly like mine but also completely different and they're all running in this glorious space where people are finding work and staying hopeful.

That's how I feel, anyways. I can't pretend to know how goddamn hard it is to get this career going from behind the ball of gender discrimination, racism, politics, terrorism and ignorance. But in the admittedly limited landscape I can survey from my point of privilege, things feel pretty welcoming. I'll do whatever I can to push that feeling out there and pull more of us together going forwards, and I know lots of others who will, too.

On to the non-touchy feely details.

VR

There's very little you could read about VR here that everyone hasn't said already. It's shit hot right now.

I do.

I'm no expert on VR, but I played one at GDC. Like many of us! But this is a safe place, and we can all be honest about it.

There's a raw, hopeful enthusiasm coursing through game development right now as we strip mine all the cruft away from that Golden Buddha that is VR As It Should Be. Who knows how many fumbly, derivative minigames and point-to-teleporters it'll take until we're there, but I think the experience we're chasing it clear: it's more of what you feel when you first tour the demos. The way your heart catches the first time you're on the edge of a building, staring off, right before you notice the lack of wind. Or face-to-face with a gentle giant, whose majesty strikes your lizard brain like a tuning fork. You--me, and the majority who've tried it, I hope--have undone those velcro straps and thought, "I wanna go back in."

VR game development seems nothing if not self-aware. We know these early products suck, or at least, that they will suck inevitably compared to where things'll be down the line. We've seen this before: films that wanted to be books, games that wanted to be films, the Internet that wanted to be TV. Given time, these media found their way (or have started to) and flowered into the full bloom of their craft. We've done this enough that we know where we stand.

I feel the marketing's more or less lining up the same way. (RemindMe! Christmas 2016) For all the hype around VR, there's a reassuring sense of restraint. The hype around it doesn't feel like this "4K 3D buy now you need it kind of hype," but more of a, "it's there, and if you're the type of person that likes buying New Things and Taking Risks, here it is" thing. It feels to me like no one's in a race to burn this thing out via overexposure--that if it and the tidal wave of investment behind it can hold out just long enough, we'll get to that killer application in time for things to latch.

So--what'll that killer app be like? And what does it mean for audio?

My favorite universal takeaway from the handful of VR talks I went to is that we don't know.

Three panels on Monday all kinda concluded with a final slide that said, "That was sixty minutes' of research and best practices--and here are half a dozen things you should try that would prove them all wrong."

And frankly, that's fucking thrilling. Because really, once we've got our wishlist of realtime geometry-based fourth-order Ambisonics reflections and occlusion and dead-on XYZ positioning and cheap A-format microphones and all of that decoding running on tiny Android devices that everyone's got Cardboards for, well. What next? We've modeled a very realistic way to localize sound. Film wasn't a solved problem with the invention of 5.1. It's the stuff we'll do next that's exciting; it's the stories we'll tell that count.

One nice thing about VR is that it makes the case for telling those stories through sound a much easier sell. 'Presence' doesn't happen without immersive audio. That's not a bullet point on my agency's pitch sheet, that's something that even the sound-blind layperson's picking up on as soon as they strap in. That inescapable link between quality audio and believing you're there (kind of the entire selling point of VR) should make fighting the cause for quality game audio a whole lot easier.

My VR experience at GDC has, if nothing else, got me flipping lots of perspectives and asking lots of questions about how sound should work, put a fire in me to try some new shit out just because it seems cool. I needed that. For however many Vives end up next to Rock Band guitars in a couple of years, those lessons are mine, and I'm glad to have them.

tl;dr

The tech's getting really cool, and we're on the eve of consumer availability, but I wouldn't worry about jumping in right now. It's still a ways before this stuff takes en masse. Potentially a long ways. If you're smart, communicative, can make good sounds and respect the art of telling a story, you'll be able to roll over and figure out how to bolt on a Ambisonics decoder some years down the line with little workflow interruption.

But if you do jump in now? Try everything.

Proactive Audio

More like this pls

That label we were looking for for a while, for games that weren't rhythm games, but felt beat-driven, connected deeply to music: we has it now.

It isn't a new concept, but it's one that feels like it's about to go wide. Eric Robinson's a sound designer, audio programmer and developer of Koreographer, a bolt-on suite of Unity Audio functionality that makes it easy for devs to get their games taking cues from the sound. He gave a couple of presentations on the case for audio-driven gameplay, standalone and at this year's Audio Boot Camp, which were full of naturally extensible examples like snapping footstep rhythms to the beat.

The demo occasionally went a little far afield--tree branches that pulse and swell to the rhythm are kind of a tough sell unless you're working on some Aldous Huxley tribute--but was super compelling for something so simple. And that's great, because it's something that shows around. Eric's doing a lot of good work to push this case forward for the rest of us, and I'm stoked to have a bit of a movement going.

**

There was another talk. Martin Stig Andersen and the team at Playdead are making a thing after LIMBO, and are finally beginning to pull the curtains back on what it is.

I'll save that for another article, but suffice to say that the stuff Martin showed hit like a warhead, and it's squarely within this wave of games whose logic is slaved to audio for the sake of storytelling and impact. I can't wait for it to land. For all of these to, really, because every great new experience that's got audio at the foreground makes it easier to make the case for audio support the next time around.

tl;dr

Koreographer's a set of tools to lash your Unity Audio-driven game to the masthead of sounds and music. Structures for lining things up, stretching a rhythm through as many corners of the game as you can dream up. If you've thought this is a thing you wanted to do, you have some tools for it, now, and you also have a name for what those tools do.

If you're on Wwise, heads up for a set of similarly useful music and audio callbacks coming sometime in 2016.

At a wider dev culture level--start thinking about how you can have this conversation with the rest of your team. What if you made it easy, even natural, for everyone to do what they were doing while acknowledging the underlying meter of the game? A plug-in for Unity that turns subdivides the animation timeline into beats instead of frames. What kinds of systems might you get rolling subtly on rhythm to glue it all together? Coming off GDC, peopleare usually bristling with inspiration and ready to dream. Tap into that and start the dialogue up.

The Feels

I thought I was done with this stuff but had to make a detour back.

Each year, there's always one or two GDC talks that get to that universal, subsurface human stuff that goes too often unaddressed in the daily churn towards making games. The #1ReasonToBe talks are perennial winners, here. There was Manveer's 2014 talk on the under-addressed stereotyping our game narratives support; there's Brenda Romero's meditative "Jiro Dreams of Game Design".

"Everyone In This Room Is a Fraud" was that this year for me. And maybe it's just because I'm uniquely in this place in life when self-worth battles and therapy and weird empty thirty-something-What Now?-ness have become constant players on life's stage, but I really needed to hear all of these incredible people speak openly about the things they did. Life is hard; creativity is hard. When you peg so much of how you feel about yourself to your craft, a couple of bad days in the DAW can leave you feeling like a total zero. When you're really good at locking into that self-hatred spiral, bad days can turn into bad weeks. To know that even those you most admire deal with this on the daily--and to really feel it in this roundtable format where you just wanted to jump in and start talking like you were out to dinner with friends, these stories were so familiar--I'm so glad I got to experience that.

I hope they un-Vault this thing soon so we can all group hug about it.

As you'll see there, and will have seen above, part of me still feels like I don't even get to feel these things, because I have been so, so lucky in life. (Holy shit. Am I imposter syndromeing right now, or can you tell this is genuine? Words suck.)

So with all that necessary privilege-disclaiming out of the way, I want to say that this year, it feels there's finally a movement afoot--or that the movement I've caught so many more open discussions on inclusion, diversification and the need for more voices in game audio this year than in years past. It seems better. I hope it's getting better. Shit like this still happens, but at the least, I wanna put a stake down and say that this year's been a personal turning point in how I see my role in all of this.

I feel like I don't think about the issue of gender and racial diversity in game audio often enough because from where I'm sitting, there's never felt like a reason to. That sounds horrible. And it is! But, everyone I've worked with has been great, and what they look like or where they're from hasn't factored into that at all. I work with people; I'm a person. This fear of wading into the minefield that is even addressing this stuff is, I think, a lot of what keeps otherwise nice and even-keeled folks who have had nothing but great experiences with audio teams of Human Beings of all sorts from saying anything at all.

But inaction is an of itself a harmful act. Playing the middle, being a nice guy, staying inoffensive and quiet--all of that doesn't help, and what doesn't help, hurts.

This stuff came up pre-GDC when a bunch of us were out at coffee a few weeks back, and I explained this feeling to my boss, who happens to be a woman in game audio: how tough it is to find a place to help, or talk about gender representation in game audio, because you don't really know how to say anything without pissing someone off--even when you know in your soul you want to do well. That I wanted to advance the conversation, but was looking for some sort of acknowledgement that I wasn't a bad guy.

Well, I didn't get it. Instead, she simply put back that that paralyzing mental juggling I do when I want to start saying anything about women in game audio? Imagine going through that with nearly everything you want to say about anything for every day of your career. And that's how the other side has it.

I was quiet for a long while after that.

So here's to hoping that all of us, whether vocal aggressors, hatemongers, clueless dolts or well-meaning passive observers in the shitty way things have come to be.. here's hoping that we can start acknowledging the ways in which we've fucked up and keep the conversation moving forwards however we can. To see opportunities where we don't need to be heard--where we shouldn't be heard--and to Step Back, Shut Up and Listen.

What's gonna be great is when it doesn't need to be a movement at all, anymore, and simply is. Until then, though, here's your impersonal Internet-delivered reminder to know when to surrender your spot to those who need it most, and do the right thing for all of our industry.

Man, I have a lot of reading to do.

tl;dr

Nope. Read the whole thing.

**

Thanks to everyone who made this year's GDC the best yet. I'll see you all at the Carousel before too long.

br>
If it were as easy as taking what you've built in Wwise and dropping it, a fully realized and performant vision, wholesale into a game, game audio would sound a lot better than it does already. It's never actually that easy. If I've learned anything in game audio so far, that's it.

When we play games, we form opinions. That's human nature. But you'd do well to tread lightly if you don't know the whole story of how that game took shape. Hear something you like? Presume that a lot of people fought really fucking hard to get it there.

And if you hear something you don't, or don't hear something you wanted to, don't presume to know anything at all.

Closing the gap between vision and execution in game development takes a lot of work from a lot of people.

On the sound side, you're going to need a creative mind to dream up the way the game should sound, conjure that initial target that the game'll strive for until it hits shelves. You'll want a technical sound designer type to take that vision and turn it into systems that will surface raw sound design in a way that hits that mark. There'll be some Producer / Sound Supervisor type to draw up all the asset lists, rolling and militarily maintained Excel sheets of required components and filenames that'll go into the grist mill and let the middleware project run. You're going to need designers to make all that stuff.

None of that matters if you aren't able to get a team behind you.

Programmer support, production time, budget, headcount--all of these are really unsexy-sounding concepts that nonetheless hold any game's features in sway. It takes people to get stuff working, and when time and money are inflexible, people are a really hot commodity. Pretty much all my takeaways from GDC last year were that the best-sounding games with the coolest tech were coming out of the most supportive studios. Gaining that support takes a champion or vision-holder who's willing to go tirelessly to bat for the stuff that counts.

It's clear from the way Sunset Overdrive's vanity and movement system turned out that they had a champion. Maybe a bunch of them! And a whole stable of talented designers; I saw something like 15 listed contributors from Microsoft alone, not to mention the entire audio team over at Insomniac. Just the same, what they pulled off sounds pretty incredible. I'm gonna quote myself here because I already gushed a ton about this last Wednesday, and it's my blog.

Six years ago, LIMBO blew minds with separate heel-toe and many complementary RTPCs coming together for the best footsteps you'd ever heard.

Custom-Tailored

Sunset Overdrive is big on clothes, and shoes. You can dress your avatar up in a half billion combinations of tops, bottoms, shoes and accessories. The visual results are often goofy, but super fun to tinker with and own. But who wants to let art have all the fun? Kristen, Bryan, Jeff and a whole whack of Microsofties went wide, recording thousands of rolls, tumbles, jumps, stretches, runs, walks and jingles for everything the art team could kick up, then manually put all those assets into Wwise structures that could operate independently and were switchable per-limb.

Again, important sub-theme here is that someone convinced someone to let them do this. Someone also ensured that all Foley assets for a given action (say, rolls) were always being trimmed to an exacting standard, ensuring that tumbling around in leather pants didn't lose any of the core energy right at the peak of the roll that doing so in blue jeans might. Seems like a thing you'd just do, but when you've got legitimately thousands of assets to cut, you'd be tempted to just trim silence and bounce that stuff out. Nope.

Final result? Your character sounds like a wonderful blend of all the ridiculous stuff you're wearing, no matter what it is. No shortcuts taken.

Layers of Awesome

Another system in Sunset Overdrive is the so-called "Level of Awesome." Think of it kind of like keeping a multiplier going in Tony Hawk, where, as you hop from rail to rail and stitch overland tricks together in a manual, you've got a big combo bonus stacking up. Now imagine that combo bonus making everything your character did while under sound way cooler. This is what they did.

The team took a bunch of actions--falling, jumping, grinding, bouncing--and matrixed them against what they felt the core of each Level of Awesome should sound like. At Level 1, your basic movement actions might have a little extra zip to them; at Level 3, you're the hero at the core of a retro arcade game, with cartoon stingers and chiptune trails following his every move.

This is a system that needs to be seen (and heard) in-game to be really appreciated, so I can't wait for the Vault video to go up.

The long and the short of it is that they fucking nailed this. Consider building this system into your next game and you'll probably think you can do it. The way you'd set stuff up in Wwise seems clear, anyways--events that play both a basic layer of a sound plus a switch-driven sweetener layer, with that switch being driven by some Awesomeness RTPC that jumps values at set crossover points. But maintaining quality and timing standards across every one of these layers, ensuring that each action is not only legitimately improved and themed for each Level of Awesome (instead of just, "yeah, we made the whoosh heavier with an EQ") but that peak energy and timings stayed consistent? That's incredible.

That it all gels so well together in-game speaks volumes to the organization of the sound team and to having a really solid plan.

And again, to having someone who managed to buy them the time and space to execute.

There's lots more to the talk that I won't bother going in, but it's full of crazy accomplishments on the game audio front. This talk alone showed me the power an empowered, passionate Sound Supervisor can bring to a game, and I applaud the entire team for pulling off what they did. Honestly, the number of talks on Sunset Overdrive at this year's GDC (two on audio alone!) are a testament to the game's technical and artistic achievements far and beyond its already awesome reviews.

I've been to GDC a couple of times in the past, always returning to reality overflowing with ideas, batteries recharged.

But this year's was something special.

Some lucky confluence of my own experiences, where my head's at, the people in attendance, the conference itself--I don't know--came together to give me a GDC I'll never forget. That sounds like something out of a John Hughes film, but I'm serious.

Funny thing is that this year, it wasn't even the talks. I attended half a dozen or so over the week in between my volunteer responsibilities, and they were great. I left them all with lots of takeaways for my current gig at PopCap, some of which I'm putting into practice already. But my God, the conversations. Sunup to sundown, with restless hostel sleep that kept my brain from processing it all before it was time to do it again.

Each day began with a familiar, early-rising ritual: the 7AM walk through the urine-soaked, scaffold-strewn jungle that is SoMa to Sightglass and a morning roundtable with the Game Audio Podcast. (Side note: how the hell is that poverty line so distinctly drawn and right below a park, two shopping centers and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts?) This initiative was fully on the rails last year, packed each morning and full of amazing discussion. This year's, though. I mean, they may as well start selling Sightglass Track passes to the conference for all the folks that were showing up daily. I want to say we were running around 40-50 bleary-eyed sound designers, programmers and audio-curious every single morning. And yet, the whole thing--this interacting with the broader game audio community--still feels intimate, like it's really ours. The companion carousel lunch hour's the same way: a free-flowing group of game audio all-stars swapping cards and stories every day. No "X years AAA development" nor shipped titles necessary.

I don't think I'm the only one who felt this way. A scrape of last week's activity on the #GameAudioGDC hashtag reveals a lot of sentimentality and gratitude, held up as maybe the most important takeaway from this year's conference.

So I'll get to digging into some of my talks, thoughts and learnings in a later post, but wanted to start the snowball rolling with a final round of Internet thanks towards the entire game audio community for being so fucking rad. Not four years ago, this site was a desperate chronicling of me and my student exercises. I wanted very badly to belong to the conversation but was sharply aware of how little I knew, how I hadn't "broken in" yet. I wore this attitude on my sleeve a lot of the time, and it's made my small steps into this career really taxing at times. Turns out I needn't have felt that way. We're all in it--from the hobbyist, the still-enrolled and the just-getting-started to the AAA sound designer and audio director. There's room around the Sightglass table for all sorts. We're fortunate to have that.

As @mattesque put it on this week's Bleeps and Bloops, "at some point game audio got to the point where people felt like they could win without other people losing."

Hello! It's been a minute. Lots to catch up on--it's probably best to just jump into present day and go from there.

Another Game Developer's Conference has come and gone, and I wanted to make sense of the whole experience, commit it to print before the day-to-day sinks back in. Let's take it point for point.

The People

If I've said it once...

The best thing about the game industry are the people within it. This is my second year as a semi-credentialed, guess-I-belong-here attendee of GDC, going by that AAA name on my conference pass--but the people of game audio have been welcoming for as long as I've had intent to join them. They're humble, kind and--thanks to the tireless #GameAudioGDC banner-flying of @lostlab--extremely visible at the conference itself.

Something I saw this year was a lot of folks going Expo Pass only, saving some scratch and eschewing the body of the conference for the networking fringe: hallway meetups and late-night business idea shares over overpriced drinks. When you've got a group as organized as game audio, it works. Each morning's Game Audio Podcast meetup at Sightglass was an informal chance to mull over the day's talks and go all wide-eyed about the future alongside all manner of rookies and vets. It's so fucking cool that the group's that close-knit, and I really need to thank Damian and Anton for setting that stuff up every morning.

My heart goes out to all the underrepresented disciplines who don't have that same social leadership, as hanging with these guys is always the best part of the conference.

The Talks

Of course, there was a lot to watch and hear that you could only get to with a badge. Everyone I spoke with agrees that GDC2014's talks were a notch up: ferociously technical and full of stuff you wanted to run back and put into practice. I've outlined two specific favorites below.

Two of the most-talked about presentations on the Audio Track talks were delivered one after another on Wednesday morning--and both by audio programmers. Tools, systems and implementation hooks are sexy, and a development team whose culture supports these things is one of the surest components of a great sounding game.

Jonathan Lanier's an audio programmer at Naughty Dog (do they have more than one? The luxury!) who spoke on the systems that went into the incredible sound of The Last of Us. That one was my game of the year--in an age when I'm spoiled for choice and spend far too much time considering, but not actively engaging with, my Steam catalog, TLoU had me running home from work to fire up the console and running my mouth around the coffee machine every morning with stories of the last night's play. Lanier outlined the Creative and Audio Directors' early pre-production talks, which set audio up for development support and eventual success, before digging into the technical ins and outs.

The audio team was able to ground their audio in the gritty realism of the world by hitching a ride on Naughty Dog's tried and tested raycast engine. This let them throw lines and cones around every crumbling environment, bringing back useful information that let them filter, verb out and otherwise treat their sound. In a game where you spend so much time crouching and listening, the sum of all these subtle treatments made for some incredibly tense pre-combat situations: planning my approach as unseen Clickers shambled and squealed somewhere off in the dark, or straining just a little bit to hear Ellie and realizing I'd jogged too far ahead.

What's important is that the team never became slaves to their own systems, putting the technique above the telling. They tried out HDR--the silver bullet audio solution of 2013--and found it didn't fit the type of perspective they were trying to put you in. So they rolled their own dynamic mixing solution. They liked the way enemy chatter faded out over distance, but that same falloff curve meant some key dialogue with Ellie could go unintelligible. So they they sent enemy and friendly NPC dialogue through separately adjustable wet/dry treatments and reverb buses.

TLoU's audio tech is impressive, but nothing any AAA studio couldn't have dreamed up themselves. It's the fact that they got so much of it into the game--and had a studio that believed in audio; that gave them the resources to do all of that--that turned it into the greatest sounding game of the year.

The only shitty thing about this talk is that it was double-scheduled alongside A Context-Aware Character Dialog System. So, you had to pick one or another--but not both. One to watch on the Vault later on.

This was the Audio Track talk that sidelined everyone this year: Alastair MacGregor's an audio programmer from Rockstar who brought with him an overview of what it took to accomplish the sound of Grand Theft Auto V. I feel Rockstar doesn't often go public about their methods and techniques--as Anton said in the podcast, Alastair's name on the program felt like "someone from Rockstar being let outdoors"--but I don't think anyone expected them to reveal what they ended up showing.

GTAV features around 90+ hours of recorded dialogue, heaps of licensed music and sound design in what is almost certainly the audio budget record-breaker of last generation. All of this was powered by Rockstar's internal audio toolset, RAGE. It's maintained and developed by a team of audio programmers and sound designers that seem to be staffed there independent of any specific game project, e.g. they're a dedicated team. They've been iterating and improving upon RAGE from around the time of Grand Theft Auto V, making RAGE--now versioned 3.0--at least five years in the making.

RAGE is insanely comprehensive in what it facilitates; it reads like a game audio Christmas list fulfilled. Thankfully, volunteers and event management were on hand to scrape flying chunks of blown mind off the walls as Alastair touched upon feature after feature. Here are a few highlights; you'll want to try to catch the talk or someone else's summary for more, because there was more.

GTAV didn't even ship on PS4, ergo: there is and will be more.

How RAGE Wins Everything

Synchronicity 3.0
When the team started running up against the wall of lining up microfragments of weapon audio and trigger timings, the RAGE team responded. The engine allows for sub-frame (e.g. more than once per 1/30th second, or, more frequently than most stuff in the game's ever making a call), synchronous, sample accurate triggering of multiple assets in different formats. Designers could stack one gun layer in uncompressed PCM, another wrapped in XMA--which would need a little decoding--and the engine accounts for this, keeping everything locked up. Did I mention that GTA was so filled to capacity that the architects had to load audio into the PS3's video RAM to hit their goals? They did, and RAGE buffers for the transfer time out of video memory and still keeps things locked.

Better Engines, Cheaper
GTAV's cars sound much better than its precedessor's. (I don't know this for sure. Haven't played GTAV yet! But, I'm taking Alastair's word for it.) Beyond simple loops, each instance of a car in GTAV is kitted out with not one, but two granular synthesizers--one for processing engine sounds, another for exhaust--that help to split source recordings into tiny, reassemble-able grains at runtime, stretching their audio further and reduce memory usage. Naturally, RAGE features a nice, graphical interface for the audio designers to tune these synths in and offers fine control, e.g. what sections of a specific sample to granulate, how to blend between these areas to create convincing idle transitions (which, as steady, non-pitching sounds are typically poor candidates for granulation). They're even able to specify a % number of grains to use from each section to get really gritty about memory usage; get the sound believable, then start paring the complexity back and ride that fine line. Thoughtful options like this mean that these synthesizers can run with brutal efficiency, so that even the CPU load of double instances per car--and the game features a lot of cars--make for an effective tradeoff vs. loading fatter loops into memory. GTAV's programmers are seventh-dan master of the Cell processor architecture.

Like Promethean Fire
There's lots of talk about procedural audio these days: sounds spun up entirely out of oscillators and code, costing very little memory at the expense of some CPU usage. The idea is that at their best, procedural sound can free up valuable memory for larger, necessarily manmade assets like voiceover and orchestral music by covering all the little bits that you don't need to maybe get sounding 100% realistic. Footsteps, physics sounds, etc. At least, that's where most of us have been setting the near-term bar, because even making those sorts of sounds out of thin air is really freaking hard to do. The general consensus has been that procedural audio is coming, but isn't quite ready just yet.

Except that fully 30% of the sound effects in GTAV were created using RAGE's procedural audio editor.

Fucking 30%. Of a game that large. That shipped on the last generation.

Alastair spent some time demonstrating RAGE's modular synth-like interface that helped make this possible. It allows their audio designers to craft and tinker towards a procedural sound asset before exporting that synthesizer configuration as an asset that can run in-game. He auditioned a few that might as well have come from a microphone; apparently, Rockstar's sound designers are pretty much all Neo. This part of the talk thrust me through the full ten stages of denial and I eventually came around to stunned bewilderment.

tl;dr Rockstar's audio tech is years ahead of everyone and we all had no idea.

Everything Else

Gosh, there's still so much to go over. FMOD, Wwise and Fabric battling down to become the de facto indie audio solution of the future, just as Unity spools up its own tech. Unreal Engine coming down from its status as a AAA platform to meet the little guys with a cheapish subscription model, and throwing back the curtain on Blueprint, its new visual scripting tool for quickly creating awesome looking stuff.

It was a week of ingestion whose digestion continues. I'll likely have more to say once the whole of the conference hits the online Vault. The plan is to kick back and nerd it up with some coworkers, catch all the stuff we missed from the Audio Track and beyond. I'm sure there's lots in there that'd equally inspire.

For now, it's time to cool my spending, crack into a side project or two and thank everyone who made last week so amazing.